Author
Topic: Negative Printer for 35mm film (Read 6307 times)

Leopard Lupus

I love shooting film, alot. I tend to grab my A-1 more than my 5D mk ll, to be honest. However, the only thing I have yet to do is actually scan my negatives into a digital format. I want to be able to share high quality images from my 35mm film to those online.I've been looking through BH for negative scanners, and have found a few. However, I'm looking for recommendations. What exactly am I looking for in a scanner when my goal is to keep as much of the negative image in crisp clear condition as possible?Thanks in advance!

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Snap. I've just moved back to film, managed to convince my mum to give me her old pentax spotmatic, seeing as I bought some lovely m42 glass for my 7D via adapter.I got it developed at the local Kodak Express, one of the few places left around here that does film, and let them scan it to CD for me for $10 all up, but the images were only 1500x1000 or so, badly compressed jpgs. They've got a scanning service for higher res, can go up to 64mb tiff files, that would cost like $60 a roll or something.

So i've just tried scanning some using my mum's scanner when i visited today, it's only an Epson V100 Photo scanner, and the images already look better than the shop-scanned ones.I'm going to have to buy my own scanner too at some point, i'm planning a move to Medium Format Film at some point this year.My points to look for so far are:- Manual brightness control. My film was shot in really dark indoor venues, just to catch the highlight on faces. Worked ok, but the shop scanner tried to even it all out to a medium brightness, it only ended up a lot noisier. Setting manual brightness on my mum's $100 scanner gave me better images than the shop's $100k scanner on default settings, imho.- Resolution. I only scanned to 3200dpi, gave me a 20-30mb tiff file, but the scanner can go to 5000 or something. No point in doing that to 400iso b+w 35mm film, but maybe if i shoot 50iso slide film i'll scan to higher dpi.- Negative holder. My mum's only has a 35mm holder and slides, nothing for a 120-film. if you on'y shoot 35mm then no need for anything fancy, i'll have to choose wisely though.- Noise. Yes it happens in scanners too. Better ones have fan-cooling, I read even Hasselblad bought a scanner company and they sell them too now.- Evenness, as in the negative is back-lit so the light behind it should be even. all but the cheapest shouldn't be too bad you'd think.

As noted, Epson has a line of photo scanners, some of which will work only with 35mm film, and some will work with larger negatives. There is a light in the top lid of the scanner that shines thru the negative, rather than using the reflective light below.

You can keep an eye on the epson store for refurb scanners as well, they get new ones in weekly.

Leopard Lupus

I am currently running Mac OS X. I see that that Epson V700 is certified for Windows Vista... Might I run into any issues with that? Do I need to look elsewhere, or will simply using a SD card and then plugging into a card-reader via USB be doable?

The Nikon scanners are really nice. You can probably find a place that scans with them and scans affordably or buy one used online (though demand seems to outstrip supply atm).

One thing I've noticed is that flatness matters a lot. A lot of my slides had very soft corners with the Nikon 9000 but when I scanned with glass the results were much better and multipass matters a lot. I found scanning film to be frustrating--the resolution is so much poorer (and grain so much worse) than digital and it's a lot of work. But the colors look incredible, velvia looks so much better than any digital alternative to me.